THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 22, 2016
61
H man shaped by money.
He'd made an early reputation
by analyzing the profit impact
of natural disasters. He liked to talk to
me about money. My mother said, What
about sex? That's what he needs to know.
The language of money was compli-
cated. He defined terms, drew diagrams,
seemed to be living in a state of emer-
gency, planted in the o ce most days for
ten to twelve hours, or rushing to airports,
or preparing for conferences. At home,
he stood before a full-length mirror re-
citing from memory speeches he was
working on about risk appetites and
o shore jurisdictions, refining his ges-
tures and facial expressions. He had an
a air with an o ce temp. He ran in the
Boston Marathon.
What did I do? I mumbled, I shu ed,
I shaved a strip of hair along the mid-
dle of my head, front to back---I was his
personal Antichrist.
He left when I was thirteen. I was
doing my trigonometry homework when
he told me. He sat across the small desk,
where my ever-sharpened pencils jutted
from an old marmalade jar. I kept doing
my homework while he spoke. I exam-
ined the formulas on the page and wrote
in my notebook, over and over, "sine
cosine tangent."
Why did my father leave my mother?
Neither ever said.
Years later, I lived in a room-and-a-
half rental in Upper Manhattan. One
evening, there was my father on TV, an ob-
scure channel, poor reception, Ross Lock-
hart in Geneva, sort of double-imaged,
speaking French. Did I know that my
father spoke French? Was I sure that this
man was my father? There was a refer-
ence, in the subtitles, to the ecology of
unemployment. I watched standing up.
A , , I went to
church and stood in line. I looked
around at the statues, plaques, and
pillars, the stained-glass windows,
and then I went to the altar rail and
knelt.The priest approached and made
his mark, a splotch of holy ash thumb-
printed to my forehead. Dust thou art.
I was not Catholic. My parents were
not Catholic. I didn't know what we
were. We were Eat and Sleep. We were
Take Daddy's Suit to the Dry Cleaner.
When he left, I decided to embrace
the idea of being abandoned, or semi-
abandoned. My mother and I understood
and trusted each other. We went to live in
Queens, in a garden apartment that had
no garden.This suited us both. I let the
hair grow back on my aboriginal shaved
head. We went for walks together. Who
does this, mother and teen-age son, in
the United States of America? She
did not lecture me, or rarely did, on
my swerves away from observable
normality. We ate bland food and bat-
ted a tennis ball back and forth on a
public court.
But the robed priest and the small
grinding action of his thumb implant-
ing the ash. And unto dust thou shalt
return. I walked the streets looking for
people who might look at me. I stood
in front of store windows studying my
reflection. I didn't know what this was.
Was it some freakified gesture of rev-
erence? Was I playing a trick on Holy
Mother Church? Or was I simply at-
tempting to thrust myself into mean-
ingful sight? I wanted the stain to last
for days and weeks. When I got home,
my mother leaned back away from
me as if to gain perspective. It was
the briefest of appraisals. I made it a
point not to grin---I had a gravedigger's
grin. She said something about the bor-
ing state of Wednesdays throughout
the world. A little ash, at minimum
expense, and a Wednesday, here and
there, she said, becomes something to
remember.
Eventually, my father and I began to
jostle our way through some of the ten-
sions that had kept us at a distance, and
I accepted certain arrangements he made
concerning my education but went no-
where near the businesses he owned.
O , were still mar-
ried, my father called my mother
a fishwife. This may have been a joke,
but it sent me to the dictionary to look
up the word. "Coarse woman, a shrew."
I had to look up "shrew." "A scold, a
nag, from Old English for shrewmouse."
I had to look up "shrewmouse." The
book sent me back to "shrew, sense ."
A small insectivorous mammal. I had
to look up "insectivorous." The book
said that it meant feeding on insects,
from the Latin insectum, for "insect,"
plus the Latin vorus, for "vorous." I had
to look up "vorous."
Three or four years later, I was try-
ing to read a lengthy and intense Eu-
ropean novel, written in the nine-
teen-thirties, and translated from the
German, and I came across the word
"fishwife." It swept me back into the
marriage. But when I tried to imag-
ine their life together, mother and
father minus me, I came up with
nothing. I knew nothing. Ross and
Madeline alone, what did they say,
what were they like, who were they?
All I felt was a shattered space where
my father used to be. And here was
my mother, sitting across a room, a
thin woman in trousers and a gray
shirt. When she asked me about the
book, I made a gesture of helpless-
ness. The book was a challenge, a sec-
ondhand paperback crammed with
huge and violent emotions in small,
crowded type on waterlogged pages.
She told me to put it down and pick
it up again in three years. But I wanted
to read it now, I needed it now, even
if I knew I'd never finish. I liked read-
ing books that nearly killed me, books
that helped tell me who I was, the son
who spites his father by reading such
books. I liked sitting on our tiny c o n -
crete balcony, reading, with a fractional
view of the ring of glass and steel
where my father worked, amid Lower
Manhattan's bridges and towers.
I other people's houses.
After school, sometimes a friend
might talk me into going to his house
or apartment to do our homework
together. It was a shock, the way
people lived, other people, those who
weren't me. I didn't know how to
respond to the clinging intimacy of
it, kitchen slop, pan handles stick-
ing out of the sink. Did I want to
be curious, amused, indi erent, su-
perior? Just walking past a bathroom,
a woman's stocking draped over the
towel rack, pill bottles on the win-
dowsill, some open, some capsized,
a child's slipper in the bathtub---it
made me want to run and hide, partly
from my own fastidiousness.The bed-
rooms with unmade beds, somebody's
socks on the floor, the old woman in
nightclothes, barefoot, an entire life
gathered up in a chair by the bed,
hunched frame and muttering face.
Who were these people, minute to
minute and year after year? It made